From: Darin Sunley (rsunley@escape.ca)
Date: Sun Dec 10 2000 - 11:52:15 MST
Nice analogies! Some recognition should probably be made however, to one
additional fact about Turing Machines. They can't change their programs, the
way a Von Neumann machine can. A Turing machine is a finite state machine
that implements a particular program, and it is nonsense to speak of
changing that program without building an enitrely new Turing machine.
Turing machines are more like special purpose electronics then "general"
computers. The hardware-software distinction disappears.
Now, if a person were to hold the position that human consciousness were
something like a Turing machine (with a tape of fintie length), they would
need to describe what it woudl be ananagous to to duplicate the contents of
the tape without the machine, or to duplicate the state-conversion rules
without the tape.
Food for thought...
Darin Sunley
rsunley@escape.ca
-----Original Message-----
From: Emlyn <emlyn@one.net.au>
To: extropians@extropy.org <extropians@extropy.org>
Date: Sunday, December 10, 2000 3:38 AM
Subject: The singer, the song, and bootleg.
[multiple snippage]
>
>So if we take the hackneyed and probably misleading analogy of
>consciousness-to-computer, the positions become these:
>
>---
>
>A program is a set of instructions to be carried out by a computer. It can
>be incribed in a stone tablet as well as stored in computer.
>
>A computer is a machine which knows how to interpret a set of instructions,
>and do what they instruct it to.
>
>A process is an instance of a program running on a computer. The same
>computer, running the same program multiple times simultaneously, is
running
>multiple, distinct processes.
>
>---
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:32:17 MST